To those of you who have done an English degree at a college/university, how long did your 10,000ish word dissertation take? (I think Americans would call it a bachelor thesis, if the word dissertation means nothing to you)
Googling it, people seem to range from the opinion that you can do it in a week easily, to the opinion that if you haven't started 6 months in advance you're screwed.
>English degree
>hard to write a thesis
lel
I didn't write a thesis. The whole program was a joke, and the degree is utterly worthless. At least I made some cool friends and fucked some hot chicks.
I already had a thesis in mind by the middle of my junior year and a lot of potential research angles. Going from there about a semester to research, two weeks to write, two weeks to edit and revise, 39 pages in total.
>10.000 dissertation
I wrote a 15k paper in a month for an optional class.
What topic?
which major really makes you a better writer?
Kind of what I'm thinking.
I've had since October when I picked my texts/authors. Since then I've meant to have been researching stuff, doing notes and stuff. I've done some, but mostly it was bullshit work just to get the work for a portfolio I have to make.
Still haven't put pen to paper so to speak, to be honest, I haven't even bothered finishing the reading.
You say a semester to research, what does this mean exactly? Just familiarizing yourself with the critical field surrounding the work, the history of the authors and the period they wrote in, that sort of thing?
Mine is due in the first week of May, but we get four weeks off to do it, so I'm feeling kind of relaxed as I have no other commitments in that time. In my mind, 9+ hours a day for 28 days means 10,000 words is a pamphlet.
Is my blasé attitude misplaced?
What topic you writing on?
Early 20th Century poetry, specifically T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Wallace Stevens' Auroras of Autumn.
Pretty entry level I know.
Haha I'm writing on the same thing. Well, sort of. I started with imagism but I'll probably end up discussing non-imagist modernist poets.
Regret choosing it desu.
>bachelor's thesis
For a capstone course? All majors here except for STEMshit have these, because STEMshit is so horribly overpopulated and filled with unreliable morons that it would require a few dozen trained wranglers to get them to do anything other than play DOTA 2 all day.
And they sure as hell are longer than 10k words.
>And they sure as hell are longer than 10k words.
I'm not sure how it works in the US which is why I guessed it might be called that.
Here in the UK, a three year undergraduate degree in English Literature ends with a 10,000 word dissertation.
math
mine is 8000. Studying English in the UK.
metamorphosis in the wasteland, my main thesis was that eliot uses classical transformation figures like Philomela and Tiresias to bridge myth with modernity
a lot of very explicit reading. the golden bough and eliot's dissertation on bradley were the hardest parts, and then like rereading ovid and a shit ton of journal searching and quote collecting. I was kind of mentally composing the structure while I researched and was pulling quotes to support and labeling them with themes.
woot, nice choice man
I could never get too deeply in FQ, it's too directly philosophical
I designed my own college major and I am getting a BA in Liberal Studies. I call it Analytical Writing, a combination of upper-level literature, history, and philosophy courses. My university is giving me 1 credit for every 10 pages I publish for my "senior capstone" - my thesis. I've written ~25,000 words so far. It's an analysis of the effectiveness of Franz Kafka, Bret Easton Ellis, and Haruki Murakami in the scope of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
I'm not in the US you twat.
Absolute joke, US schools too.
Fucking awful.
This is why college is not taken seriously anymore.
Why is it so bad?
Because 'interdisciplinary' nonsense only has value where there is a connection, and actual relevance of the fucking topic.
How one decent writer and two awful ones fit a fucking meme hierarchy made up by some systematizer is below trash.
basically this. Also colleges should not let students design majors, structure is important for students and "special snowflakes" shouldn't get out of that.
Protip: Unless you plan to freelance professionally or teach English, an English degree does... exactly... nothing! And you can do the former w/o a degree.
Honestly, get a real degree. If you like writing & English so much - more power to you! Some other degree will help you use English much better than the English degree itself.
There are few worse degrees than English. Unless you're an enterprising sort of person who can get by. And if you're that sort of person, college is already beneath you anyway.
Seriously, turn back now while it's not too late. Learn some STEM skill. If you can write 10k words you can probably learn CompSci, at the very least!!! You don't even HAVE to be good at comp sci to get a fulltime job in the US.
They can structure it though electives anyway, and there ought to be enough diversity in major/minor courses that they can cater it much to their want as they want.
I never wrote one actually. I did grant writing for my senior cap stone. My university has a capstone project system that looks better on your resume than just doing a thesis. The idea is you undertake some kind of project that benefits the community, in this case the grant program is basically unpaid labor by students to secure grant money for local nonprofit organizations. I have to agree, it's a lot more impressive on the resume than a thesis and was some great experience in how to apply English skills in a practical way, but I feel like I missed out sometimes.
nice try stemfag. Not becoming a robot for you
If you refuse to learn how to write/build/design robots, you're gonna be left in the dust. This is how the world is going to be.
I'm not saying robots will be able to write English as well as an Engilsh degree holder can. But they can already vastly outproduce you. And as technology continues to progress, further and further your skills will be invalidated. They already are out of date. Sorry.
>And they sure as hell are longer than 10k words.
An undergraduate thesis? No, 10k sounds about right for the various universities I've looked at. The guidelines at my school were "3 to 4 pages typically" with one syllabus saying "no less than 8,000 words".
Now a Master's Thesis, that's something else entirely.
>falling for the singularity meme
Buddy, a 10k word essay is not unusual as a term paper in 3rd year here. 4th year courses often require 15k, capstone courses which take place over 2 terms require 20k at least plus community work.
Fucking pathetic.
thats the worst argument you could come up with.
If thats the thinking, why would we need mathematicians when robots could just work 500000x better than the human mind? Or any other profession?
I know up to calculus III and im satisfied with that. I may not know how to build a robot but I have other talents. People can be positive towards science without specializing in college for the division of labor.
Science is cancer and always will be.
I didn't say you were in the US you shitter, I said I have no idea what country uses the term.
>Seriously, turn back now while it's not too late.
I graduate in less than two months, is it still too late? Should I quit now?
I majored in English and I approve of this message.
Yes. Dropping out in your fourth year is the ultimate "fuck you" to the establishment.
>dissertation
>10k words
bruh
i wrote a 25k word thesis for political science
it really wasnt that hard. id say i did 85% of it in a month.
for 10k words I'd give myself (generously) 1-3 months for research (depending on the topic), two weeks to write, two weeks to edit.
in the USA, 'dissertation' is typically applied to the work of graduate students.